Bend over and let us drive …

May 14, 2008

Yesterday when I went to work, gas locally was $3.64 a gallon. When I came home less than 9 hours later, gas had jumped up in price by 31 cents, to $3.95. What happened?

Sadly, we’ll never get any reputable answer from the government or the oil companies that own it, have officials in their pockets, that run the country, and indeed, most of the world. They’ll simply tell us that the cost of oil jumped — though the gasoline we buy now was processed from oil bought long ago, at a cheaper price. They’ll tell us demand is high, and that the current refineries are old and over-taxed, and they’re using the profits for new refineries, though the refineries haven’t been running at capacity for years and years and no new refineries have been built, all while oil company profits have gone from impressive to astoundingly ridiculous.

It doesn’t just affect us at the pump. These endless price jumps are affecting everything else – the production, delivery, and rising prices of food being a good example. Hell, even my garbage pickup service is charging fuel surcharges, and someone I know got zapped with an extra $30 for some home maintenance because the company had to USE THEIR TRUCK to come to the house!

One of my friends used to have part-time job at a local car wash. His day consisted of periodically dumping the trash and filling the soap dispensers for the wash, but mostly he spent a good amount of time standing around, reading magazines, and watching women bend over while cleaning their cars out.

But he also watched the two gas stations across the street change their prices. The prices of gas and diesel would go up, go down, go up, go down, sometimes several times a day.

“I didn’t see a damned oil barge pass by,” he would say, and wonder again why prices went up and down on gasoline already delivered to the station and already in the tanks.